Texas book reviews and author interviews from the companion "Will's Texana Monthly" and elsewhere.

The Bookshelf, The Parlor, The Young Texas Reader, and the Monthly

The Texas Bookshelf is different from the The Texas Parlor, http://texasparlor.blogspot.com/ . The Texas Parlor carries "general" bookish information and non-book information and even different Texana news and notes of use to the bibliographically challenged and other nosey folks intersted in historical, literary, and cultural observations. Will's Texana Monthly may carry material from either blog, but extends itself beyond those, especially for longer compilations or treatments. The Monthly, the Bookshelf and the Parlor are all companions. So, is the Young Texas Readerhttp://youngtexasreader.blogspot.com/ which specialized on books and such things for the youngest to the teenagers.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Last Renegade - Kearby

Mike Kearby brings young readers another well- paced Western novel set in South Texas 1877.Codified retributive justice is first found in Hammurabi's Code from the ancient Mesopotamia river valleys – "an eye for an eye."But here the story involves a couple of young boys and a girl and a dog.

Young-Man-Listens, a nine-year old Comanche, is captured by slavers and sold to a travelling circus where the nefarious Shelly McDuff cages him and bills him to gawkers as "The Last Renegade – Chief Raging Bull" for two years.Then the show rolls into Sheriff Miller's Territory.Miller's eleven-year-old son, Jake, immediately sees through the injustice of the imprisonment and sets the young Comanche free whereupon the two plus Marty scat on a trail of hiding, hunting, capture, a fight (partially aided by Walter the dog), and ultimate salvation by Jake's father.Young-Man-Listens eventually relents on the impulse of worst vengeance and rides off toward home in Oklahoma.A side plot that finally weaves it way in is about the scarcity of water and a new spring on the Miller's land that triggers a greedy plot of multiple murders.